Interesting Politician in Ohio

There's an article at City Journal called "Reagan's Unlikely Heir" that details a politician who is less interesting for his point of view (typical Reagan conservative) than for what he represents: the next step in the emancipation of black America from single-party rule. His own political education is one of the most intriguing parts.

Though Ohio's decline has been steepest in the last ten years, the state has been on a downward arc for more than three decades, transformed by both Democratic and Republican administrations from one of the country's lowest-taxed states to its current high-tax, slow-growth model. Ironically, the man now bidding to reverse the state's course has been on exactly the opposite ideological arc. Coming of age in the 1960s, Blackwell tilted toward the radical activism of that era. Sporting an Afro and a dashiki, he headed the African-American student association at Cincinnati's Xavier University, attended Martin Luther King's funeral as the school's representative, and studied the organizing principles and confrontational politics of Saul Alinsky, founder of the far-left Industrial Areas Foundation. A football star with an athletic scholarship, Blackwell took a break from activism after college to try out for the National Football League's Dallas Cowboys, but when the team tried to turn the linebacker into an offensive lineman, Blackwell turned his back on a three-year deal to play pro ball and returned to Xavier for graduate school. He leaped into the political arena, running for the local school board in a race that he narrowly lost in 1977. He took time out to marry his high school sweetheart, Rosa, who after 35 years in the Cincinnati school system rose last year to become its superintendent, successfully leading it off Ohio's list of most troubled school systems by year's end.

Her husband fashioned his first winning coalition in politics when he started to reject the Left's nostrums because they conflicted with his own family-inspired beliefs. By the mid-1970s, he already opposed forced busing as a solution to black educational problems, because he doubted that black kids needed to sit next to white ones to do well. Noticing how white parents took advantage of Cincinnati public schools' open enrollment policy, which allowed talented kids to select schools outside their districts, Blackwell became an early advocate for school choice. Mindful that many families in public housing seemed stuck there, Blackwell began to worry that government programs to help the poor were instead breeding dependence, and he became one of the few black political leaders of the 1970s to preach that the responsibility for rising out of poverty rested with the individual, not the government.

Those who must live under a dictatorship often hate it more than those outside its confines. This is the kind of phenomenon that we are seeing here in relation to the welfare state.

-- CAV